Friday, November 16, 2018

Just in case
Dave Regan’s lopsided
defeat on last week’s ballot measures wasn’t bad enough, he suffered an even
more embarrassing ballot-initiative blunder in his home state of Ohio.

In a f*ck-up
of interstellar proportions, Regan’s Ohio dialysis initiative was knocked off the
ballot because, well, Dave forgot to have his signature-gatherers fill out a
required state form.

Way to go, Dave!

It gets
worse. Ya see, Dave didn’t happen to notice his mistake until he’d already
spent upwards of $4.1 million on his Ohio initiative. D’oh!

Of course,
we’ve all made mistakes, right? But have you ever made a $4
million mistake? And it wasn’t even Dave’s money!

Here’s what
happened.

After Regan’s
SEIU-UHW filed an initiative against
the kidney dialysis industry in California, Dave then filed copycat initiatives
in both Arizona and Ohio in an
apparent attempt to "up the ante" on industry leaders.

But in Ohio,
Dave soldiered on like a preacher consumed by the holy spirit. He spent
millions on signature gatherers in a fervent quest to qualify his initiative,
called the “Kidney Dialysis Patient Protection Amendment.”

In fact,
Dave paid $3.6 million to a California signature-gathering company called PCI Consultants (headed by Angelo Paparella) to run his Ohio effort,
according to campaign expenditure records from the Ohio Secretary of State.

And he paid
thousands to the law firm of his private Ohio attorney, Michael Hunter of “Hunter, Carnahan, Shoub, Byard, & Harshman.”

In late
July, Regan triumphantly filed 296,000 signatures to try to qualify his constitutional
amendment for the ballot. But he was
9,500 signatures short. Fortunately for Dave, the Ohio Constitution gave
him ten more days to collect the missing signatures. One more chance!

Ten days
later, after spending even more money on his signature-gathering campaign,
Regan finally hit the target. Except for one important thing. Dave’s crack team
forgot to have the signature gatherers sign a state-required form required before
collecting voter signatures. Whoops!

Dave’s
opponents, the Ohio Renal Association,
leapt on Dave’s blunder like a pack of hungry wolves on a T-bone steak. They sued
to block Dave’s initiative on the grounds that his signatures were invalid. In
a 7-0 decision, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed, thereby knocking Dave’s multimillion
dollar initiative off the November 2018 ballot.

Maybe his
memory ain’t so good these days. Perhaps his fistfight in a Sacramento bar and his headline-grabbing assault on a
process-server have resulted in the premature demise of a few of Dave’s brain
cells.

But you gotta
hand it to Dave. When he f*cks up, he really f*cks up big-time.

According to
campaign disclosure records, Regan spent $4.1 million on his Ohio campaign. And
in June, he loaned $1.7 million of SEIU-UHW’s funds to the Ohio campaign. That
money has not been repaid, according to the Ohio Secretary of State. These
figures don’t include all of the national TV advertising, which tallied
millions more.

Regular
people get fired if we make a $50 screw-up at work.

So why isn’t
Dave held accountable for his repeated multi-million-dollar blunders? Shouldn’t
he be fired?

Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the
UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, said Regan’s campaign, unlike his
opponents’ effort, failed to deliver a clear message to voters about why they
should support it.

In case losing
wasn’t bad enough, Regan also helped deliver a giant payday to his
multi-billion dollar opponents. The day after the election, the stock price of
both DaVita and Fresenius soared. In fact, DaVita’s share price jumped by 9.9%, according
to CNBC.

Way to go,
Dave!

Regan’s loss
on Proposition 8 wasn’t his only defeat.

In Northern
California, voters delivered an even bigger thumping.

Two city-wide ballot
initiatives lost by a landslide. In Palo
Alto, Regan’s Measure F lost by
a margin of 77% (“No”) to 23% (“Yes”). Meanwhile, in Livermore, Measure U
lost by a margin of 82% (“No”) to 17% (“Yes”).

Both initiatives
targetedStanford Health Care in an effort to
pressure the healthcare system into giving Regan a special unionization deal.
If the measures had been approved, they would have capped healthcare providers’
revenues.

SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan

Duane Dauner – the former CEO of the
California Hospital Association and Regan’s one-time paramour --led the campaigns to defeat the two initiatives. Meanwhile, Regan’s former pals at Kaiser Permanente contributed money to defeat Regan’s initiatives.

Will Regan
finally hang up the towel on ballot initiatives?

This year,
he doubled down on his so-called “innovative” strategy of using ballot
initiatives to “rebuild” the US labor movement. And he circulated more
initiatives than
during the past six years combined. At the end of the day, however, not a
single measure was successful.

As a result,
Dave successfully flushed upwards of $30 million of SEIU-UHW members’ dues
money down the toilet.

Has Regan
finally learned his lesson?

It doesn’t
look like it. Late on election day, Regan issued a press release announcing his
plans to refile the same dialysis ballot initiative in 2020. WTF.

Will
SEIU-UHW’s members allow Dave to flush millions more dollars down the toilet?

Friday, November 2, 2018

The results
are in from the internal union election at SEIU
Local 73 in Chicago. But the controversy is far from over… with allegations
of election misconduct filed just days after the ballot count.

Here’s what’s
happening:

On October
23rd, the votes were tallied in the mail-in balloting to elect the union’s top
officers and 30-member Executive Board. The election came after a two-year
trusteeship imposed
by SEIU President Mary Kay Henry
and a
2017 court battle launched by Local 73 members to bring an end to the
trusteeship. SEIU’s trusteeship featured a cast of well-known characters,
including Eliseo Medina.

Who won the
election?

SEIU’s
trustee, Dian Palmer. But by just
375 votes. Until recently, Palmer was the president of SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin. She’s also a member of SEIU’s
International Executive Board. She beat out Remzi Jaos, a former staff member at Local 73. He’s part of a slate
called “Members leading Members”
slate, which pledged to return the union to local control.

As far as
the election for Local 73’s Executive Board, the “Members leading Members” slate
won eight of 30 seats.

Participation
in the election was very low. Only 2,300 ballots were cast from the union’s 25,000
members, who work in the public sector in Illinois and Northwestern Indiana.

Just 6 days
after the vote count, the “Members leading Members” slate formally appealed the
election. It also plans to file charges with the US Department of Labor over
alleged misconduct by SEIU officials during the election, including using the union’s
resources to campaign for SEIU’s candidates.

For more
details, check out a one-page leaflet from the “Members leading Members” slate
as well as the election appeal it filed earlier this week.

Thursday, October 25, 2018

This week, Dave
Regan trotted out an interesting “spin” on his ballot initiative gamble.

Regan’s mathematically-challenged
spin goes something like this:

Regan has
spent $20 million of SEIU-UHW members’ money on a statewide ballot initiative
targeting the dialysis industry. Meanwhile, two multinational dialysis
companies have spent a combined $105 million to oppose the initiative. Even if
Regan’s initiative loses at the ballot box, Dave says he’s still a winner
because the other side was forced to spend more money.

Win or lose, Dave Regan, the healthcare
worker union leader who is pushing an initiative to regulate dialysis clinic
profits, is getting some satisfaction at the huge sums being spent by the
dialysis industry, $105 million and counting.

“In a weird kind of way, we must be doing
something right,” Regan said, referring to the spending.

So why is
Dave’s spin “mathematically challenged”?

Dave forgot
to mention some important details.

For example,
$105 million is barely a drop in the bucket for these mammoth companies. Their combined
annual revenues are $51 billion, with annual combined profits totaling $4
billion. $105 million represents less than 0.2% of the companies’ annual
revenues. It’s like a few pennies to them.

Meanwhile,
Dave spent $20 million of SEIU-UHW members’ money, which represents about 20%
of the union’s annual budget. Ouch!

Imagine if
you gambled 20% of your organization’s annual budget… and you lost.

No wonder
Dave is test-driving some spin… especially now that the election is less than
two weeks away. Publicly, Regan says his union’s own polling indicates the initiative will win, according to a press
release issued by SEIU-UHW this week.

Meanwhile, Regan’s
$20 million gamble appears to have come at the expense of the union’s basic
day-to-day work – such as bargaining good contracts and representing workers on
the job. In recent months, two separate groups of SEIU-UHW members formally requested
elections to decertify SEIU-UHW and go non-union, according to NLRB records.

The two groups are USC Verdugo Hills
Hospital (a 158-bed hospital in Glendale, Calif.) and Santa Rosa Community Health (an outpatient clinic system with 12
campuses and 500 staff in the San Francisco Bay Area). Regan has instructed his
attorneys to stall the elections as long as possible.

Like Dave
said: “In a weird kind of way, we must be doing something right.”

Friday, October 19, 2018

The ballot initiative campaign with the
highest price-tag in California's 2018 midterm elections isn’t about rent
control or the gas tax, it’s about kidney dialysis, and specifically, how much
profit providers can make from the procedure.

Supporters and opponents of Proposition 8,
the “Fair Pricing for Dialysis Act,” have contributed almost $120 million
during the 2018 campaign season.

In fact, these
numbers have grown even higher since the article was published three days ago.
According to the California
Secretary of State, Regan has pumped $20.4 million into the campaign while
opponents have poured $105.6 million into their effort.

Regan
launched this statewide ballot initiative after SEIU-UHW was unsuccessful in organizing
kidney dialysis workers a couple of years ago. Regan hoped his punitive measure
would serve as leverage to force the industry into a backroom unionization deal
-- just like Regan tried to do with the California
Hospital Association.

Apparently, Regan’s
threats weren’t enough.

According to
one source, the two sides met in Sacramento to discuss a possible deal just days
before the deadline for withdrawing initiatives from the ballot. After 30
minutes, however, the meeting reportedly ended when Regan stormed out of the
room.

That’s what led
to the full-on fight we’re now witnessing at the ballot box… with Regan’s
billionaire opponents pouring five times as much money into their campaign as
Regan.

At this
point, it’s impossible for SEIU-UHW to finagle any sort of deal from the
industry as Regan no longer has the ability to remove his initiative from the
ballot.

So, SEIU-UHW
is left in a no-win position… even as it spends tens of millions of its members’
dollars on a no-win proposition.

Meanwhile, SEIU-UHW’s
public image is taking a beating in the press. All of the state’s major newspapers
have editorialized against Regan’s initiative including the Los Angeles Times, San
Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, San Diego Union-Tribune, San Jose Mercury
News, Fresno Bee, La Opinión, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Modesto Bee and Bakersfield
Californian.

Many of the
newspapers are angry at Regan’s repeated attempts to use the initiative process
as a bargaining chip rather than a tool to create better public policy. For example,
the Santa Rosa Press Democrat writes:

Proposition 8 is nothing short of an abuse
of California’s initiative process, which allows anyone with enough money to
put a proposed law on the ballot.

This initiative is designed to punish
dialysis clinic operators who have resisted union efforts to organize their
employees. Voters shouldn’t play along.

We don’t have a position on whether clinic
employees should unionize. However, we’re absolutely certain that voters
shouldn’t be asked to judge a regulatory scheme for a specialty medical
procedure that literally is a matter of life and death for tens of thousands of
California residents suffering from serious kidney disease. That’s a job for
the Legislature and the state Department of Public Health Services.

Proposition 8, sponsored by the Service
Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, supposedly is
about improving conditions at the 588 licensed dialysis clinics around the
state. Yet there is nothing in this initiative about standards of patient care…

This isn’t the first time these unions have
used ballot initiatives to try to gain leverage at the bargaining table. But
this fight doesn’t belong on the ballot, as voters are in no position to write
accounting rules for dialysis clinics.

To date, Regan
has gambled tens of millions of dollars of his members’ money on ballot
initiatives… without success. This year, he introduced no fewer than 10
initiatives.

Friday, October 12, 2018

Here’s the
latest from San Francisco, where SEIU-UHW’s
Dave Regan has joined
forces with tech billionaires, real estate titans, and the billionaire CEO
of a cryptocurrency company in an effort to defeat pro-worker candidates running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Last month,
Regan dumped a quarter million dollars of SEIU-UHW members’ money into a Super
PAC associated with tech billionaire Ron
Conway. In the past, Conway’s Super PAC has “netted five-figure donations
from Facebook, Google, and Airbnb,” according
to the SF Weekly.

In recent weeks, Conway’s Super
PAC dumped $640,000 into “Independent Expenditure” campaigns aimed
at defeating two pro-labor candidates, according to campaign records published
by the California Secretary of State.

One of the targeted candidates is Gordon Mar, the Director
of Jobs with Justice San Francisco, which is part
of a network of pro-labor nonprofit organizations across the nation. The second is an anti-eviction lawyer who serves on the city's Board of Education.

The
avalanche of Super PAC donations from Regan and his corporate buddies has
already prompted multiple complaints alleging campaign law violations,
according to the SF Weekly.

San
Francisco is an especially illuminating stage for Regan to flaunt his love-acts
with tech billionaires and plutocrats.

Using data
from the US Census Bureau, the city’s Human Services Agency concluded
that San Francisco has more income inequality than Rwanda and other
sub-Saharan countries. And the Brookings Institute found
that San Francisco’s income inequality is growing faster than any other
city in the nation.

Meanwhile, San
Francisco’s housing costs are off the charts. City officials discovered
that 42% of the city’s Latinos are living doubled-up with another family in one
unit.

So why the
f*ck is Regan working with billionaires to attack pro-worker candidates in the
city with the highest income inequality in the nation?

Hotel workers striking Marriott in San Francisco

And how can Regan's $250,000 contribution to the Super Pac possibly be in the interest of SEIU-UHW's rank-and-file members?

Perhaps Diamond
Dave is on the take.

After all, his timing is impeccable.

Regan dumped SEIU-UHW’s quarter million dollars into
anti-worker campaigns at the same time that thousands of UNITE HERE members are striking Marriott, the largest hotel operator in San Francisco.

So Dave, what kind of secret deal did you make with your billionaire buddies?

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Remember
SEIU’s trusteeship of Local 73 in
Chicago, which represents 25,000 public-sector workers in Illinois and
Northwestern Indiana?

In August
2016, SEIU President Mary Kay Henryimposed
the trusteeship based on the claim that tensions between the local union’s
top two officers were disrupting it. She appointed Eliseo Medina, Dian Palmer
and Denise Poloyac as trustees.

Eighteen
months later, members of Local 73 sued
SEIU and asked a federal judge to end the trusteeship and allow Local 73’s
members to elect a president and Executive Board. Under federal law, a
trusteeship is presumed to be invalid after 18 months.

That lawsuit
-- known as Hunter vs SEIU -- was filed in February 2018 in US District Court
for the Northern District of Illinois. This summer, a federal judge held a
five-day hearing on the suit.

One month
after the hearing concluded, the SEIU trustees announced officer elections. Earlier
this week, mail-in ballots were sent to the union’s members and are due back October
23, according to a timeline posted on Local 73’s website.

Remzi Jaos

Initially, SEIU’s
elections committee tried to block the opposition slate’s leading candidate from
appearing on the ballot. Eventually, they backed down and Remzi Jaos, a candidate of the “Members Leading Members” slate,
is on the ballot as a candidate for the president of Local 73. The slate is campaigning on a platform of returning control to local members.

Jaos
formerly directed Local 73’s Higher Education Division and before that was a
staffer at SEIU Local 1 and the Illinois Nurses Association, according
to his bio on the “Members Leading Members” website. See below a photo of the
slate’s candidates.

At the top
of SEIU’s slate is Dian Palmer, who’s
been one of SEIU’s appointed trustees at Local 73. Before that, she was the president of SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin. She’s also a
member of SEIU’s International Executive Board.

The “Members
Leading Members” slate says SEIU officials changed internal rules to allow
Palmer and other SEIU staffers to qualify as candidates for the election. Here’s
how they describe it in a leaflet:

In a sneaky move in July, Palmer got the
International to waive the 2-year membership requirement for her and the other
trustees. This waiver was done before any Local 73 members were notified by the
Election Committee that the two-year membership requirement was changed to a
six-month membership requirement!

Another SEIU
staffer, Jeffrey Howard, is a
candidate for the Executive Vice President. Howard, an “Assistant Area Director”
for SEIU International, began working on the trusteeship team at the beginning
of 2018.

In a
September 26th filing in federal court, the plaintiffs in Hunter vs SEIU
express additional concerns about the integrity of the voting system and the
security of the ballots once they’re sent to an outside agency hired by
SEIU to oversee the election. For example, they raise concerns about how "replacement ballots" will be issued and tracked, and how ballots returned as "undeliverable" will be handled and accounted for.

Ten days
ago, Dave Regan deposited a quarter
million dollars of SEIU-UHW members’
funds into a Super PAC to oppose two pro-worker candidates running for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.

One of the
candidates is Gordon
Mar, the Executive Director of “Jobs
with Justice San Francisco,” a pro-labor organization backed by many unions…
including SEIU.

Go figure.

According to
campaign
records, Regan dropped the $250K into a PAC that’s long been associated
with billionaire tech investor Ron
Conway, a San Francisco resident who’s been sharply criticized for using
his cash to exert outsized influence on San Francisco politics.

Just days
after Regan deposited the money into Conway’s PAC (“Progress San Francisco”), the
PAC funneled more than $120,000 into two “Independent Expenditure”
campaigns to oppose the pro-worker candidates. (The two IEs are “San
Franciscans for Change, Supporting Johnson and Trauss for D6 Supervisor 2018”
and “Safe and Clean Sunset Coalition, Supporting Ho for D4 Supervisor 2018.”)

SEIU-UHW's Dave Regan

Conway, once
dubbed the “Godfather of Silicon Valley,” was an early investor in Google,
Facebook and other tech companies. He was the single largest donor to former San
Francisco Mayor Ed Lee… dumping
$600,000 into an independent expenditure committee to support Lee. After Lee
was elected, observers criticized him for taking actions to benefit the companies
in which Conway has investments.

When Lee
died suddenly in office, Conway threw his support behind London Breed, who defeated two progressives in June 2018 with the
help of a half million dollars of Conway’s money, according to campaign records.
Breed now sits in the mayor’s office.

Regan, by pouring
$250,000 into Conway’s PAC, has joined forces with a gang of SF business titans.

In recent
days, a business association representing San Francisco’s 40 largest employers --
the so-called “Committee on Jobs” --
dumped $50,000 into Conway’s PAC. The group’s board is headed by Lloyd Dean, the CEO of Dignity Health, which employs about
13,000 of SEIU-UHW’s members. Conway also serves on the Board of Directors of
the “Committee on Jobs.”

Another
contributor is Diane Wilsey, the
owner and CEO of A. Wilsey Properties
Company, a San Francisco-based real estate company. Last week, she dropped
$150,000 into Conway’s PAC, according to campaign
records. (See below.)

Diane Wilsey -- Dave's pal

Wilsey, the
daughter of a US ambassador and the great-granddaughter of the founder of Dow Chemical, inherited $300 million
and a real estate company when her husband, a real estate tycoon, died in 2002.

She’s also a
socialite who pays special attention to the ballet, the opera and museums, which
earned her the title of “San Francisco’s queen of philanthropy” by the New York Times. (Jori Finkel, “For
San Francisco’s Queen of Philanthropy, No Quiet Exits,” New York Times, August 1, 2016)

By the way…
she loves her pet dogs. She donated thousands of dollars to put her dogs’ names
on the walls of a San Francisco museum, where her pure-bred canines are
memorialized as generous donors to the museum.

WTF, right?

And here’s a
shocker.

Wilsey reportedly
doesn’t have much respect for regular people.

A former director of San
Francisco’s museums told the New York
Times: “She can laugh and joke with anyone, even a truck driver. Her
failing is that she has not always listened to what people told her if they
didn’t have social standing.” (Laura M. Holson, “Dede
Wilsey Is the Defiant Socialite,” New
York Times, September 24, 2016)

Another
former director put it more bluntly: “A lowly staff member does not command her
attention. There is a master-servant relationship that gets in the way of
things.”

Yo, Dave… she
sounds like a f*cking perfect ally for the workers in SEIU-UHW. Great job.

So who are
the two candidates opposed by Regan, Conway, Wilsey, and the other gold-plated
execs?

One is Gordon Mar, the Executive Director of “Jobs
with Justice San Francisco.” He’s a candidate in District 4 for the Board of
Supervisors. The second is Matt Haney,
a tenants rights attorney who served as the President of the Board of Education.
He’s a candidate in District 6.

Diane Wilsey relaxing with her dogs

Mar and
Haney have each been endorsed by more than 20 unions, including UNITE HERE, NUHW,
CNA, UFCW, Teamsters, the teachers’ union, the San Francisco Labor Council, and
SEIU Local 1021. They’ve also been endorsed by groups like the Green Party, the
San Francisco Tenants Union, San Francisco Berniecrats, the San Francisco
League of Pissed Off Voters, as well as progressive members of the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Meanwhile,
their opponents -- Jessica Ho, Sonja Trauss and Christine Johnson, whom Regan is backing to the tune of $250,000 --
are each endorsed by just two unions.

So why is
Regan working with corporate fatcats to oppose pro-worker candidates?

First of
all, this isn’t new for Regan. Since Andy Stern appointed him as the trustee of
SEIU-UHW, Regan has dramatically reshaped the union’s former political orientation
in order to align it with business executives and the right wing of the labor
movement.

In 2014, for
example, Regan joined billionaire Conway and AirBnB investor Reid Hoffman
in backing David Chiu, another
corporate Democrat, in his race against David
Campos, a progressive candidate for a California Assembly seat in San
Francisco.

Secondly,
there’s undoubtedly a transactional deal hidden behind Regan’s contribution --
a tit-for-tat exchange in which Regan kicks down $250,000 of SEIU-UHW members’
money in return for some secret benefit to Regan.

From the
face of it, it’s difficult to see how SEIU-UHW’s numbers could possibly benefit
from defeating pro-worker candidates and replacing them with corporate Democrats
beholden to a billionaire tech investor and corporate bosses, including the CEO
of Dignity Health.

Leave it to
Regan -- a so-called “21st century thinker” -- to sell out workers
in favor of corporate executives.

For more
information, see excerpts from campaign filings below. Also, here are links to several
articles:

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

SEIU
President Emeritus Andy Stern has once
again shown his true colors.

In an
upcoming election for a seat in California’s legislature, Stern has jumped in
on the side of billionaires to back a corporate Democrat who’s challenging a union
member supported by progressive organizations, multiple local unions, Bernie Sanders’
Our Revolution, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and California-based unions
inside SEIU.

The November
election pits Jovanka Beckles -- a Teamster, two-term Richmond city councilmember and DSA member -- against Buffy Wicks, a former White House official and Clinton Super PAC
director who recently relocated to California and has never held elected office.

According to
records from the California
Secretary of State, Stern has made two contributions to Wicks this year. When
contributing the funds, Stern identified himself as a “consultant” for Grandview, LLC, a corporation founded
by Stern soon after he resigned as President of SEIU in April 2010. (See below.)

Incorporation
documents confirm Stern’s role in the company (see below). Stern may use the corporation
as a vehicle for his
consulting gigs with tech companies like Uber and AirBnB. Stern’s company is
registered to a Washington, DC apartment -- presumably Stern’s -- which appears
to have a “grand view” of the Potomac River.

Jovanka Beckles (left) and Buffy Wicks (right)

The race for
the California legislative seat has features similar to recent electoral
contests in the US including the one between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe
Crowley.

During this
spring’s primary election, Wicks received $1.2 million from “wealthy donors
tied to Lyft, Uber, and Bay Area tech firms, charter school interests, major
landlords, a health care industry PAC, and Govern for California, a
business-oriented Super PAC created by the board chair of Walmart and a former
top advisor to Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger,” according to an article
authored by labor journalist Steve Early.
(Steve Early, “Teamster
Tackles Corporate Democrat in California Assembly Race,” Labor Notes, August 31, 2018)

Ex-SEIU President Andy Stern is an
individual endorser of Wicks—despite the fact that two major SEIU locals and
their state council favor Beckles. Since leaving the union, Stern has become a
corporate board member and gig economy consultant… In the Assembly District 15
race today, California single-payer advocates favor Beckles over Wicks, whose
position on health care reform is much weaker.

If Beckles’ consistent solidarity with local
labor causes is reciprocated through sufficient union voter turnout and
spending on her behalf, she may indeed be joining the Assembly in January.

And there, she will be a rare
“corporate-free” voice for many other working class and poor Californians whose
interests tend to be overlooked by state legislators who do take money from
business PACs and industry associations.

Beckles is
backed by multiple unions including the National Union of Healthcare Workers,
Transit (ATU) Local 192, University Professional and Technical Employees (CWA),
Teamsters Joint Council 7, SEIU Local 1021, the Alameda and Contra Costa County
Labor Councils, the California Labor Federation, both statewide teachers’
unions, AFSCME, and the California Nurses Association.

Friday, September 7, 2018

SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is getting more attention in the news… this time for
allegations that he and other top SEIU-UHW officials engaged in harassment
against women inside the union.

On August
21, Payday Report published an
article detailing the latest developments in a lawsuit filed by Mindy Sturge against SEIU-UHW and Marcus Hatcher. Sturge first filed the lawsuit in May, but filed an updated and amended suit in July in Alameda County (Calif.) Superior Court. (Mike Elk, “Sexual
Misconduct Lawsuit Filed Against SEIU Prez’s Top Ally,” Payday Report, August and 21, 2018)

Until
recently, Hatcher directed SEIU-UHW’s Kaiser Division and served on the union’s
Executive Board and Executive Committee. He was one of Regan’s top allies. Sturge,
a “Coordinator” in SEIU-UHW’s Kaiser Division, was directly supervised by
Hatcher.

Here’s an
excerpt from the article. A full copy of the revised lawsuit is below.

Payday Report has learned that one of the
largest Service Employees International Union locals in the country,
California-based SEIU-UHW, has been sued in Alameda, California for sexual
misconduct and assault committed by a top SEIU official against one of its
former organizers. The lawsuits, obtained by Payday Report, accuses SEIU Vice
President Dave Regan, who also serves as President of SEIU-UHW, of engaging in
sexual misconduct…

SEIU-UHW has long faced criticism as one of
the most corrupt and undemocratic union locals in the country; leading many
#metoo activists to believe that the undemocratic culture within the union has
bred a culture where misogyny and sexual misconduct flourish…

Now a lawsuit filed by a former SEIU
staffer, Mindy Sturge, accuses SEIU-UHW President Dave Regan and former
SEIU-UHW Kaiser Permanente Division Director Marcus Hatcher, of sexual
misconduct and retaliation against Sturge for reporting it.

The lawsuit filed by Sturge also accuses
SEIU-UHW of knowingly hiring organizers such as [Pedro] Malave who have been
accused of sexual misconduct in other parts of the union.

According to the lawsuit: “Sturge and other
women employees, and women union members were the subjects of inappropriate
remarks that addressed their looks, their bodies, and their
availability/interest in relationships. Sturge was also subjected to offensive
touching, and she and others were discussed in inappropriate texts and in
comments heard by or related to Sturge”.

Sturge reported the comments to SEIU-UHW
management on several occasions, but no investigation was undertaken until
Sturge was physically and sexually assaulted by Hatcher in September of 2017.

When Sturge finally did report the
incidents, the lawsuit alleges that Regan, who was responsible for
investigating all claims as President of the SEIU-UHW, verbally abused and
berated Sturge in front of other staff members.

In November of 2017, Hatcher was reportedly
fired from SEIU-UHW for violating SEIU’s non-fraternization policy, but the
union took no disciplinary action against him for engaging in alleged sexual
misconduct and assault. Nor was an action taken against SEIU UHW President Dave
Regan for harassment of Sturge.

During this time period, the lawsuit alleges
that Hatcher and his allies made social media posts and verbal comments
accusing Sturge of lying about the story and trying to shake down Hatcher and
the union for money after engaging in a consensual sexual relationship with
Hatcher.

The lawsuit alleges that that “SEIU-UHW and
its agents furthered the false and defamatory narrative about Sturge by
announcing to others, both internally and externally, that Hatcher was fired
for violation of the union’s non-fraternization policy as opposed to Hatcher
having violated SEIU-UHW’s anti-harassment policy and/or having assaulted
Sturge. This gave rise to the implication that Sturge and Hatcher had a
consensual relationship or that his termination was the sole result of his
consensual relationship(s) with other union staff and/or members”.

The lawsuit
alleges that Hatcher and/or other SEIU-UHW staffers waged a campaign on
Facebook and other social media designed to trash Sturge’s reputation and to lie
about what happened. Here’s an excerpt from the lawsuit:

Among other things, these posts claim that
Sturge had lied about the sexual assault by Hatcher, that she had “a consensual
affair” with Hatcher, that she had ruined Hatcher’s life and career, that she
is a “liar and manipulator,” that she is “a cheat and a home wrecker,” that she
traveled to Los Angeles to further her alleged consensual affair with Hatcher,
that she would go “bar-hopping” with Hatcher, and that she had reported Hatcher’s
conduct to SEIU-UHW solely for the purpose of obtaining a monetary settlement…

According to
the lawsuit, all of these statements are false and originated from Hatcher
and/or other SEIU-UHW staffers. The latest version of the lawsuit says that
when some of these Facebook post attacking Sturge were shown to Greg Pullman (SEIU-UHW’s Chief of
Staff), he called the posts “disgusting.”

If the
lawsuit proceeds to trial, says Payday
Report, it could produce “volumes of evidence” that could shine a light on
why top SEIU officials like Regan “were allowed to get away with sexual
misconduct and retaliation against those who reported it.”

Thursday, August 30, 2018

This month marks the tenth anniversary of some of the headline-grabbing events that led up to SEIU's disastrous trusteeship of SEIU-UHW.

Ten years ago, SEIU-UHW --
then led by president Sal Rosselli
-- was one of the most successful healthcare unions in the nation. Labor
journalist Steve Early called SEIU’s
takeover of SEIU-UHW “the mother of all trusteeships.” Unfortunately, it gave birth to a
Frankenstein-like child headed by Dave
Regan, who quickly drove the once-powerful union into the ground.

So what
happened ten years ago?

During
August 2008, a reporter named Paul Pringle
published eight articles in the Los
Angeles Times detailing a massive corruption scandal perpetrated by Tyrone Freeman, one of Andy Stern’s closest allies.

During the months
leading up to August 2008, Freeman had served as Andy Stern’s attack dog in
Stern’s campaign to “implode”
SEIU-UHW. A boatload of Stern’s staffers also worked on the campaign, such as Stephen Lerner, Dave Regan, Bill Ragen, Tom DeBruin, Josie
Mooney, Debbie
Schneider, Steve Trossman and Denise Poloyac.

Andy Stern

Earlier in
the summer of 2008, Freeman was riding high after Stern initiated a maneuver
to transfer 65,000 union members out of Rosselli’s SEIU-UHW and put them in
Freeman’s union… without a democratic vote by the workers.

Following the
transfer, Freeman would have led one of SEIU’s largest local unions… and he then
would have delivered all of his union’s votes to Stern at SEIU’s conventions
where Stern sought reelection as the international union’s president.

But in
August 2008, the curtains were finally pulled back on Freeman’s years-long
corruption scandal and he plummeted to earth like a flaming meteor.

Stern, angry
at the loss of his loyal ally, announced on August 25, 2008 that SEIU was
launching trusteeship hearings against Rosselli’s union. During the preceding years,
SEIU-UHW’s members had caught Stern and his DC-based staffers making backroom
deals with healthcare corporations that sold out workers and patients, and
violated democratic principles.

In 2010,
Stern resigned as the President of SEIU after launching yet another disastrous
attack, this time against UNITE HERE.
Freeman, in turn, ended up in federal prison. "May God have mercy on
me," said
Freeman at the time of his sentencing. "I am accountable for these bad
decisions."

Meanwhile, Rosselli
and his crew of rank-and-file leaders launched the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) as a militant,
member-led, democratic alternative to SEIU.

Ten years later, this history stands sharper in our collective memory.

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